I was hoping someone else would’ve said this by now, but I think I’m going to have to be the jerk.
In my post about the British atheist bus campaign, I said I wasn’t interested until I actually saw the ads, which were attractive and well-done.
Because initially I was afraid they might look more like the following visual atrocities:
I wasn’t terribly interested in the atheist bus campaign until I saw the photos – it’s a simple but rather nice design.
Also surprising, many of the photos and also this video are via sexblogger Zoe Margolis. Which reminds me I haven’t read Greta Christina for too long.
The New York Times article includes the following I-don’t-even-know-where-to-begin passage:
An interesting element of the bus slogan is the word “probably,” which would seem to be more suited to an Agnostic Bus Campaign than to an atheist one. Mr. Dawkins, for one, argued that the word should not be there at all.
But the element of doubt was necessary to meet British advertising guidelines, said Tim Bleakley, managing director for sales and marketing at CBS Outdoor in London, which handles advertising for the bus system.
For religious people, advertisements saying there is no God “would have been misleading,” Mr. Bleakley said.
(Hi-res photo here. That’s creator Ariane Sherine on the left, and I believe Polly Toynbee of the British Humanist Association on the right.)
Update: A.C. Grayling connects:
It would be misleading, eh? Thus the metaphysical authority of advertisers. You have to take your hat off to this one. If one wished to cite a better example of insidiousness, pusillanimity, timidity and absurdity, you would be hard pressed. There is something delicious about the thought of a functionary in an advertising agency doing ontology by arbitrating on the question of which fictional characters need a grey area of uncertainty around discussion of their existence – Little Red Riding Hood? Rumpelstiltskin? Santa? Betty Boop? Saint Veronica (who allegedly started out as sweat on a cloth and became a person)? Aphrodite? Wotan? Batman?
More of this, please – we hear far too much about the pope’s moral pronouncements, and everyone else’s too little.
The Archbishop of Canterbury will urge people to treasure children and respect others during the economic downturn in his annual new year message.
Dr Rowan Williams will say it is important to “take children seriously” and focus less on “material wealth”.
He will call on people to question public policies and ask how they will benefit the young and most vulnerable.
(BBC News, “Archbishop urges values rethink”)
Though even better than liberal church heads would be secular philosophers. I wish the anglophone world were more like France, where the top philosophy professors are public intellectuals, sought after by reporters for moral comment. (Or so I hear.)
'If you're a believer ... the most dubious thing becomes possible. Your faith and your aggression should be limitless.' (Josh Axelrad)
This work by Zach Alexander is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
